Pandemic Report
The latest stats from CDC:
Worldometer daily:
Yes, this summer's mini-wave continues, perhaps most notably being FLOTUS Jill Biden {she also caught it last summer, a vaccine breakthrough case). There are other anecdotal cases like a Pontiac MI high school football team which had to forfeit a game over an outbreak.
FDA approval of the new updated vaccine booster is expected over the weekend, with CDC approval later next week. No word on when we can expect rollout nationally.
It appears that prior infection or vaccination bolstered immunity appears to provide adequate protection against serious disease with highly mutated new strain BA.2.86,
Other Notes
The Singapore webpage hits continue to distort blog readership statistics, up to thousands per day. It's obfuscating real readership stats; I wish they would stop, but I'm not sure what to do. Twitter was interesting when my Baby Boomer tweet went `viral. It was authentic to my own childhood. Still, if you have a hot tweet, you'll attract a number of trolls who don't even understand the generations
I've probably been on a handful of federal contracts which have expired for anything from failed recompetes to service cost-cutting or contract consolidation elsewhere. Sometimes in a recompete you follow the job to the winning contractor. That's never happened to me. It's not clear why it happens. Maybe the position was cut for cost-savings reasons; maybe the employer had its own personnel. I've sometimes been terminated weeks shy of contract expiration. One thing about IT workers and risk control: for example, most of my post-academic professional work has been as a database administrator. Managers consider you a risk of going rogue, of exacting vengeance for your job loss. It's not relevant to me because I have scrupulous professional ethics and pride myself on reacting to adversity with grace and honor.
But I did know a co-worker (Jeff) who did do something nefarious back in my APL timesharing days. Both Jeff and I had worked for IP Sharp (not together). IP Sharp brought in a cost-cutter branch manager when the APL timesharing business was beginning to fade given the ongoing cheap PC revolution. (We sold expensive mainframe computer cycles.) Instead of getting a long overdue raise, I got laid off. I didn't take it personally; co-workers were also being laid off. Anyway, I eventually found similar work at TCC. I did a number of things, including developing a utility which could convert streamed program code into usable code on our system. So, for example, if we brought over a former IP Sharp customer, we could connect to the client's IP Sharp account and migrate the application. That's the context: Jeff had connected to the client's account on which we estimated would take $200 in time burn to download app code. But Jeff decided to use the connection to download some accessible unofficial IP Sharp utilities and proudly invited me to his terminal while I saw my own utilities being used in what I considered criminal activity. I think he expected me to high-five him on the fruits of his vengeance. Apparently, the client complained when Jeff burned $800 vs $200. Jeff rolled his eyes and pleaded innocent: "It took longer than I thought it would..." I won't go into full details here; but I ended up confiding in my "17 years in IT" branch manager BB what had happened. Later the branch secretary burst into my office and literally threw a meager quarterly bonus check envelope into my face, screaming at me for "finking on Jeff". Ah yes, BB, who obviously didn't respect my expectation of discretion, self-righteously arrived on the scene saying we had clients doing training the next day, and he couldn't have this nonsense going on and fired us both. (I was rehired days later.) I've mentioned BB in other blog posts, beyond the scope of this post.
The problem is in trying to explain government contract-related terminations to others, e.g., if you have to file unemployment. If you claim you were fired, they assume it had to do with job performance, what you did, were you warned, etc. In my experience, it was more of a proactive layoff. Technically they could have booked me another 2-3 weeks, but given the reality of IT risk aversion. I've seen workers give 2 weeks' notice and be immediately walked off the premises.
It looks like I got my Facebook account restricted twice. In neither case was I given an explanation. All you get is this blanket violation of unspecified community guidelines. All I was doing was reading and liking posts in my feed and an occasional repost. Did the repost of Jimmy Buffett singing "Come Monday" violate some IP rule? Not sure. It was weird seeing Facebook strip my liking a brother-in-law's post. Things seem to be back to normal. I tried to appeal the situation but the submission process wasn't working. his is different than when they censored 2 or 3 reposts.
